Star Trek Adventures Rpg Pdf Download
Maggie Schnair
Star Trek: Adventures was a big release from Modiphius last year and I, like a lot of people, was really excited for a new RPG in one of my favourite TV universes. I had spoken to their head honcho Chris Birch at Expo and what he pitched sounded really interesting, so I eagerly picked up the PDF on release and started running it round October. A hiatus to continue a Shadowrun campaign meant we only started playing it again recently, and I think I am ready to deliver a verdict having come back to it with fresh eyes.
The first thing that struck me about Star Trek Adventures was that the whole thing feels very rushed. Some chapters feature perfectly good writing but others are badly laid out, and feel ill thought through. When looking up various rules things were frequently not where I expected them. This inconsistency throughout the book extends to the art direction which goes from pictures of beautiful starships like this:
The other sort of advancement is Reputation, which is your legacy in Starfleet. You start out neutral and doing questionable things will lower it while doing exemplary things will increase it. There are all sorts of ways to affect reputation, as outlined in this chapter, but the idea of pulling off something awesome and getting a medal or having a risk blow up in your face and have the potential of a court martial hanging over you are both really awesome options for a campaign.
You and your friends gather together around a table, armed with some paper, pencils and dice. (Pizza and beer are optional, but highly recommended.) Three to five players take the roles of characters on a Federation starship. Perhaps one of them is an inquisitive Vulcan science officer, or a hardened Bajoran freedom fighter, or an even-tempered human captain; the rules allow for almost any kind of character you've seen on the shows, and then some.
The final player is called the Game Master. It's his or her responsibility to narrate the story, adjudicate actions, act out nonplayer characters and structure the overall adventure. In other words, the players are like the star actors, while the GM is like the writer, producer, director and supporting cast, all in one.
In short, tabletop RPGs are half board game, half improvisational theater. The rules dictate the general actions you can take, like firing a phaser or piloting a starship, but how you tackle challenges and interact with your fellow crewmembers is up to you. RPGs are a form of collaborative storytelling, with game systems in place to keep things fun, unpredictable and fair.
You can't have a "Star Trek" game without starships, and "Star Trek Adventures" provides plenty of these. Just as the players create their own characters, they will also collaborate to create their very own starship, complete with a name and NCC number designation.
Creating a starship is, for the most part, just as smooth and interesting as creating a character. I was worried that my players might each have wildly conflicting ideas about their home in the stars, but within half an hour, they'd ironed out everything from its mission profile (border patrol), to its special abilities (versatile onboard laboratories), to its name and registry number (USS Kumari, NCC-1066.)
Like characters, there are plenty of ways to make your ship unique, from its space frame to its profile. You could have a Galaxy-class vessel like the Enterprise-D on a deep-space exploration mission or a Defiant-class vessel defending the Federation from the Jem'Hadar. When you take an action aboard a starship, the ship itself gets an extra die roll to help players out. Easy enough. [The 15 Best Ships on Star Trek, from V-ger to the USS Vengeance]
But things get complicated in starship combat. Honestly, what the rule book needed was an example of starship combat in play, from the beginning of the encounter to the end. What we got instead is about 20 pages of complicated rules, procedures and strategies. After reading through the whole section about three times, it still took an hour to run our first two rounds of starship combat (the Kumari against a Klingon battlecruiser), and my players weren't at all clear about which actions required them to take a turn (recharging shields), and which were passive (certain sensor sweeps).
While most RPG core rule books start out with mechanical information and discuss lore later on, the "Star Trek Adventures" core rulebook front-loads background information, even though it's the sort of background information that most people who want to play a "Star Trek" RPG will already know.
In spite of a confusing layout and some unnecessarily crunchy rules, "Star Trek Adventures" is the most accessible, balanced and imaginative "Star Trek" game to date. Everything from creating characters to buying momentum incorporates a bit of unpredictability, resulting in adventures where the characters can succeed and fail in spectacular ways. Both the players and the GM have to play fair, and it's clear from the book's gorgeous design and informative sidebars how much the developers love the source material.
If you can find a few like-minded galactic explorers, you should at least try the free quick-start rules for "Star Trek Adventures." It'll take about 3 hours to pick up and play, and by the end of it, you'll know for sure whether you want to continue your explorations. My players sure did; we've been going strong since June fighting Romulans, solving murder mysteries, rescuing Federation scientists, rooting out spies, confronting moral dilemmas and more. I even wrote some theme music for the group.
Modiphius-Jim failed to answer your question, but I am sure he will correct my answer, LOL. Our original understanding was that Determination points cannot be lost until spent, so each character gains a Determination at the start of each adventure session, and can retain up to three.
I have to ask: So if I ad DM offer one of my players one Determitation to activate one of his Values as a Complication, and he do not use this determination in the Session, he loses it at the end and starts the next Session with only one Determination?
On the other hand, since development is so static (compared to e.g. level-based systems like D&D), you need virtually no time to adjust NPCs. From the start of the campaign to the end, you can throw in a drunk Human in a bar or a Borg Assimilation Drone and they will be an appropriate challenge for the group.
I continue to enjoy the way these adventures are presented. While they frame some scenes and introduce problems to be overcome, there is a lot of room to adjudicate how the players want to address a problem, and what tools the GM wants to use to resolve them. I also like the follow up mission briefs to help create a call back to situations so the adventures feel like they have greater meaning.
These include situations like negotiating a hostage situation, escaping a gravity well, participating in a trial, modifying a transporter beam, deciphering a new language, or running triage after a major disaster. There are more where that came from. One new aspect introduced to extended task rules involves guidelines for what the work track, magnitude, resistance, and difficulty should be when an extended task affects many life forms, from under 100 to all the lifeforms in a star system.
I have already prepped two adventures for my player group to go through. So I like the system enough to continue to play it. I hope they (Modiphius Entertainment) are planning some good sourcebooks to refine the rules for the eras.
List of all known Star Trek adventures - Definitely GM Only! My spreadsheet listing every Star Trek adventure I could find, from all official systems and a few unofficial ones. Contains many Spoilers!
Adventure: Twisting With Shadows - Written for an aborted adventure-writing contest run jointly by Star Trek Adventures and Star Trek Online, I suspect mine may have been the only submission. Anyway, here it is, a sort of seedy underworld thing to do with pirates and weapon smugglers, in the STO setting.
Adventure supplement: 'World With a Bluer Sun' calculator - A spreadsheet for imperfectly estimating how much a thing might affect the player characters, in the published adventure 'World with a Bluer Sun'. Saying any more would spoil the plot. If you're running that adventure, you'll figure it out. If not, it's no concern of yours anyway.
Campaign Ideas list - A bunch of hooks I have for different styles of campaign that could be played in future. Some of these could possibly also be shrunk down to single-session adventures, instead of full campaigns.
Power Effects table - Summary of all rules effects that add or subtract from the ship's Power.
Random Encounter Tables - Rough guidelines for random starship encounters. More of a quick hook generator than a full encounter builder.
Random Starfleet Starships - A random generator that I've put WAAAAAY too much time into. It's always bugged me that so many Starfleet starship names are obviously named by 20th century Americans, with none of the ample variety we should see from the interstellar collection of cultures and languages across the Federation. In my own games, I like to dig for more varied and interesting sources of names for ships, but I still didn't feel like I was getting it right with just ad hoc last-minute searches. I thought an easy solution would be to pre-generate a list of good names, and while I was at it, also put in a random picker. It wasn't too much harder to incorporate my random registry number picker (above) to add more detail to each random starship name. Most recently, I've adjusted it further so that only names relevant to existing Federation members are used, based on the year chosen to work out an appropriate registry number. I've drawn on both Alpha and Beta canon to populate the name's list, but the GM of each game should have final say in what names are appropriate enough. Most of the Earth names were drawn from Wikipedia, often from topical lists. So far, I've gathered over 4000 names. And all of this, just to name one single ship at a time.